Contents

HISTORY

The Template Toolkit began its life as the Text::MetaText
module, originally released to CPAN around 1996. This itself was the
public manifestation of an earlier template processing system I developed
while working at Peritas (now Knowledge Pool -
http://www.knowledgepool.com/)

Text::MetaText was the prototype - the one we always planned
to throw away. It did the job well, showing us what worked and what
didn't, what was good and what was bad, and gave us some ideas about what
could be done better, given the chance to start again from scratch.

Some time late in 1998 I threw away the prototype and started work on the
Template Toolkit. By then I was working at Canon Research Centre Europe
Ltd. (CRE), involved in a general research programme related to web
publishing and dynamic content generation. The first alpha release was in
June 1999, followed by numerous more alpha and beta releases culminating
in 1.00 being released on 2nd December 1999.

A month or so later, work had begun on version 2.00. The plan was to get
the template language relatively stable in version 1.00 and not worry too
much about performance or other internal matters. Then, version 2.00
would follow to improve performance, clean up the architecture and fix
anything that, with the benefit of hindsight, we thought could be
improved. As it happens, me starting work on version 2.00 coincided with
Doug Steinwand sending me his parser variant which compiled templates to
Perl code, giving a major performance boost. As well as the speedups,
there are a whole host of significant new features in version 2.00, and a
greatly improved internal architecture. Apart from a few minor "fixups"
the template directives and language have remained the same as in version
1.00

Version 2.00 was available in beta release form in July 2000, just in
time for the 4th Perl Conference where version 1.00 was awarded "Best New
Perl Module". After another extended beta release period, version 2.00
was released on 1st December 2000.

CONTRIBUTORS

Many people have contributed ideas, inspiration, fixes and features to
the Template Toolkit. Their efforts continue to be very much appreciated.
Please let me know if you think anyone is missing from this list.

If you submit a patch/pull request then please make sure you add your own
name to this list and include it in the changes.